St. Patrick's Garland Revisted

Last year, I made this garland for a little St. Patrick's Day fun.

This year I am finally getting the broken blinds replaced and don't have a place to hang that HUGE garland. 

Enter this sweet little hutch my dad brought up from AZ this past summer. My parents moved and don't have a place for it in their new house and they were kind enough to haul it up to WA and give to me. I have had a lot of fun decorating with it. I though I would cut my garland down to size and hang it on the hutch. 

But it needed a little....something. 

Pizazz. 

Glitter.

It really needed glitter. 

I don't know if it's because I have a child in preschool or because glitter is just really awesome, but I am having quite the love affair with glitter lately. 

I scrounged around and found gold glitter leftover from a project Mom and I did a few years ago that involved glitter and mini-gourds. I had JUST enough to glitter three shamrocks. Little Missy was very excited to help me.

Here's how we did it:

We used glue, fine glitter (sometimes called scrapbook glitter), paint brushes and (the secret) AquaNet hairspray.

I mixed about 3 tbl of glue with about a teaspoon of water and we painted that onto the shamrock.











Then, working very quickly before the glue dried, we sprinkled the glitter all over the shamrock.

There were some dry spots so I would dab those with a little bit more of the glue mixture and then added more glitter. I let them all dry and then sprayed the shamrocks with short bursts of the hairspray. The hairspray really helps with keeping the glitter from falling off the shamrock.














Then I re-strung them onto the green ribbon and hung them on the hutch.

Side note: that little flower in the gold frame was the first thing I ever counted cross stitched!

It only bothers me a little that it doesn't go green-gold-green-gold

They didn't all come out QUITE how I wanted them to (I barely had enough glitter for the last one) but Missy kept on saying, "These are going to be beautiful, Mama." 

And you know what? 

They are.

Hello Friends! Hello Spring!

So let's just cut to the chase, shall we?

I've been gone awhile. With the new baby I thought I might be out of commission from the blog for three months-well, she's almost eight months old now and I'm just starting to feel as though I can get back into crafting and blogging. Heck, I'm just now feeling as though I can do more than get dressed and put food on the table! That has been my goal for the last eight months.

Adding a third child has been terrific-My Sweet Baboo is just the sweetest, best behaved baby-but I went through some postpartum depression for awhile and it prevented me from being able to do much of anything.  But on clear headed days I was busy! I made bunting to hang on my mantle for Valentine's Day. I glittered up some X's and O's to place on my hutch. I threw a baptism party for my daughter.

And I've been quilting.

I finished my niece's quilt (finally!) back in December. I vowed I would not go into 2014 with that hanging over my head, so sometime in the last week of December I finished it.  However, I don't think I took any pictures of it before I sent it down to her.

The next pick in the lottery was #30: Finish my sister Connie's quilt. I've been working on this one since the beginning of the year. The top was pieced together-I just had to quilt it. I used my regular sewing machine and quilted the middle part and now I am hand quilting the outermost border.

Everything in place to hand quilt

Simple diagonal lines for the quilting. You can see the green markings I made 

I checked today and it looks as though I am more than three-quarteres done with the border. I should probably start thinking about what fabric I am going to use to bind it.

Hopefully it's Spring where you are. It's raining right now but the last week was pretty glorious here with the warmer weather and glorious sunshine! I snapped a few photos of what's blooming in my garden.

I started seedlings on Tuesday and saw this little guy on Friday!

Grape Hyacinth that runs rampant in my garden

Ornamental plum starting to bud out

 I'm definitely looking forward to more sunshine, warmer weather, and lots more sewing!

Let's go!